Sergio Benvenuto

Biography

He studied at the University of Paris 7 between 1967 and 1973, where he obtained a Maîtrise (master's degree) in Psychology. In the same period he followed seminars by Roland Barthes (at the École Pratique des Hautes Etudes) and Jacques Lacan. He obtained his second degree in Sociology (in 1976) at the University of Urbino (Italy) and trained in psychoanalysis with analysts Elvio Fachinelli and Diego Napolitani in Milan, where he lived and worked between 1974 and 1979. He was Visiting Researcher at the Philosophy Department of the New School for Social Research (1989-1991). Since moving from Milan to Rome he has divided his work activities between research in Social Psychology with CNR, his private practice as analyst and his writing, both as author of papers and as journalist publishing in newspapers and magazines. In 1984, he co-founded the cultural magazine Lettre Internationale (which comes out with editions in German, Italian, Spanish and several other languages). He also contributes to American Imago and to various international magazines (such as the French L’Evolution psychiatrique and Cliniques Méditerranéennes, the German Texte, the Russian Psykoanalyz). In 1995 he founded in New York the semestral Journal of European Psychoanalysis, later EJPsy - European Journal of Psychoanalysis, which he edited until 2012 (www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu). Since 2011 he teaches Psychoanalysis at Kiev’s Institute of Depth Psychology.

Thought

Benvenuto has addressed fields apparently very different from one another – social psychology, philosophy of language, political philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory – in the nineties he began to structure a predominant project that touches upon all these fields: to replace the primacy of reflection on Truth (typical of Western culture) with a reflection that aims at the Real. In this way he seeks a third way between the two predominant and opposing Western cultures: positivist epistemology (concerned with the truth conditions of propositions) on the one hand, and hermeneutics (concerned with disclosing a Truth that unravels throughout human history) on the other. He adopts the concept of Real from Jacques Lacan, but broadens its meaning, including in it everything that remains external (origin and remainder) to every structure of sense, whether scientific, aesthetic, ethical and political. The Real is the background upon which every scientific theory, every artistic production, the psychoanalysis of each subject, every ethic arrangement, revolves and it is always in excess of all these “discourses”. Thus, the Real of every scientific theory is the Chaos that sets itself as the limit and background of every causative process. The Real in psychoanalysis is the background to the drives, the bodily, irreducibly individual background before which all interpretation stops. In particular (for example in La strategia freudiana [The Freudian Strategy] and in Perversionen [Perversions]) he has engaged in an original reinterpretation of Freudian theory and of psychoanalysis in general, as founded on a precise metaphysics of “the signifying flesh”. Freud’s interpretative and explicative tissue, however, also refers to something uninterpretable and inexplicable: the drive as an opaque non-signifying source of subjectivity.

Recent English Language Publication

Main Works in Italian and Russian